Friday, June 26, 2015

I've added to my Photo Booth prop collection! The first batch were for one of Dora's parties and are a bit girly-themed. So before we went on family vacation last year, I made another set for a little more variety. We had a super fun photo session with all the littles ... I was snapping photos for about an hour!

See? The bow works well in the hair or as a neck tie!

They were used again for the second grade class party this week. Super fun!

Would you like them, too? Here you go! Assembly instructions can be found in the original post.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

I've still been baking, but the weekly recipes and photo shoots were getting to be more of a chore than a pleasure. And while school life always gets busy this time of year, there were a few extra events throwing our schedule off track, such as ...

The honor of traveling to Michigan State University last month for the Odyssey of the Mind World finals! Our middle school team won their regional competition ... then WON states (holy cow, that was so cool) ... which made them eligible to compete against 65 other teams from all over the world. Dora and Theo are both on the team and Mr. Hotcakes is the coach, so we all hopped the bus to MSU! It was an amazing experience, both in what they learned and how much fun they had. I really can't say enough good things about the program, it's incredibly hard work, but also incredibly rewarding.

Clark has had a many ups and downs lately. While he did great on our trip to Michigan (for the most part) the last three weeks of school were incredibly challenging. He also celebrated his First Communion (praise the Lord! I was worried all year about whether he'd go through with it.) and bridged to a Bear scout. He continues to be a big thinker and makes me laugh every day. Always trying to understand what's going on in that little walnut of his.

(And look! Cookies!)

I've also been working quite a bit (yay). Did you know that my updated work can be found here? The spotgirl.net website is long overdue for a change, that's also on my long list of projects. I've been having a lot of fun working by hand and have been using Instagram and Tumblr to post those works in progress. I don't have any of my own materials that I'm currently marketing and am hoping this playtime helps point me in the direction of what to do next.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Special shout out to a good friend who I know will be very excited about this post (hi, Laura!) Yes, I've been gone for awhile. Pool season wrapped up in May, and life got crazy busy. But I do have a small bank of baking pics to post. These bars are kind of a cheaty baked good in my opinion, because it uses lots of pre-processed foods vs. whole ingredients, but tasty nonetheless.

Replace the coconut (bleck) with white chocolate chips (mmm).

Also line the pan with baking parchment to make removal and cutting stress-free (as long as you wait until they are reeeeally cool to dig in)!